From the Vaults: Blogorium Review - Equinox

(Return to) Equinox: A Journey (Back) Into the Supernatural

Weird times call for weird movies, so in a movie that makes sense only to the Cap'n, I gravitated back to Equinox: A Journey into the Supernatural.

Once upon a time, I wrote this about it:

Equinox: A Journey Into the Supernatural is a very interesting film...

wait.

let's take that back a step. It would be a great film if it weren't for the actors, who often deliver stilted dialogue that just barely matches their lips and sounds like it was recorded in someone's bathroom.

That being said, the premise and much of the execution of Dennis Muren and Mark McGee's 1967 movie is very promising. They set things up quickly and try their damndest to keep things interesting until a kicker of an ending, and the idea of a book that unleashes demons from hell is always fertile ground to explore. (speaking of which, the thought that Sam Raimi hadn't seen this movie before he made The Evil Dead is right up there with Terry Gilliam never having read 1984 before making Brazil)

In a nutshell, four (presumably) college age students are headed to a party up in the mountains, and decide to visit one of their professor's in his cabin, only to discover a mysterious castle and a book that monsters really want to get their hands on. But it's wrapped up in such a way that the frame story brings the dread fast and pays off in a way that must've seemed very clever in 1967.

Muren has much love for King Kong and Ray Harryhausen, and he cooks up some pretty impressive stop motion beasties to populate the set pieces, as well as a practical but very cool vision of the afterlife and hell. Knowing what he's done since certainly doesn't hurt matters, but as a start this was pretty keen.

This is not to say the movie's a-ok, cast aside. It could stand to be twenty
minutes shorter, and it's only 71 minutes as is. Inordinate amounts of time are spent with our four leads saying "you're probably right" or "that sounds best" after questioning the thing they were going to do in the first place. The middle of the movie would be best served by some tightening, but for a first timer, the promise outweighs the stumbling blocks.

Of course, this is assuming audiences ever saw Muren and McGee's version. See, they sold it to Jack Harris, the B-Movie producer who made The Blob a hit, and he sat on it for three years, before hiring Jack Woods to recut and reshoot parts of the film and release it as Equinox in 1970.

So how is the Jack Woods cut of Equinox?

Awful. Unbearably terrible, and missing everything that works about the
original. For one thing, they felt audiences wouldn't be able to follow the movie, so at every opportunity, there's voice-over or ADR to explain every mundane plot point until it's readily apparent what's going to happen. This is ignoring the new footage, of course, which also serves the purpose of explaining plot points, and replacing the central plot about the book's power and replacing it with Director Jack Woods playing as wizard named Asmodeus who exists in the movie only so the director could molest his female lead.

The cast does their best to blend old and new footage together, and since they don't appear to improved as thespians, you generally don't care. But by condensing the opening and losing much of the location and dread, the movie derails any payoff later, and instead changes the ending into "bad guy chases the kids" and dulls the impact of the final shot. Oh, and the voiceovers... Yeesh!

Criterion's done a nice job with both cuts of the film, with the 1970 cut looking the better of the two. The newer footage stands out over the original material, but overall it isn't as rough as the 1967 version, which suffers from heavy print damage and what looks like three or four scenes culled from a beaten up VHS version of the movie. That being said, they're both perfectly
watchable, provided you're interested in this kind of thing.

I agree with most of this, but will add the following caveats having listened to the commentary:

1) I hadn't realized that the movie was made on 16mm film stock and shot silent. This explains a) the lack of overlapping dialogue and b) why the audio sounds so strange. Most of it stays close to the script but was likely ADR'd in less than ideal conditions. The movie does get props for using a theremin though.

2) The pacing can be wildly erratic. Since they only had 30 seconds worth of film for each shot, the editing is actually pretty good, although Muren admits that "if I had been able to, I would have removed one or two frames from the beginning and ending of each scene".

Still, the opening moves at a pretty quick pace and sets up a mystery you'd like to know more about. Unfortunately, it takes a long time (in a short movie) to get back to the monsters. Once the stop motion gets kicking again, the relatively young filmmakers do keep things well integrated and it is fun. That second act just drags a bit much.

3) While I still think that The Evil Dead perhaps unconsciously borrows from Equinox, the co-writer admits the "book from hell" came from Jacques Tourneur's Night of the Demon. I suppose that all of this could have been floating around in the ether when Sam Raimi headed to Tennessee, but Equinox and Evil Dead share a number of intertextual links, and as the "Dead" series go on, it adds onto the "professor in the cabin unleashes a book of the dead" with a frame story (Army of Darkness) and more stop motion monsters (Dead by Dawn). The "other dimension" sequence also visually presupposes Phantasm by almost ten years.

4) The Jack Woods cut / extended version is as sleazy now as it was when I reviewed it the first time. One gets the impression Woods was trying to mimick the Roger Corman "cheapie" formula but got mixed up. There's none of the T&A but all of the lecherous older man on younger woman action. In that regard it's a little more like the Al Adamson films of the 70s. It takes away some of the punch of "a dimension you shouldn't meddle with" by adding Woods' sorcerer character to boot, but no one says you have to watch it. The picture is just better.

It's fun to go back to something you reviewed two and a half years ago and take what you've learned in the interim. Equinox is unfortunately not the kind of movie that would work in a "group" atmosphere, ala Horror Fest, because of its erratic pacing. It is, however, enjoyable to watch by yourself if you have a soft spot for home-made horror.